DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
THURSDAY Only my third day, and I must say that it isn’t so easy being a Tory press officer in the AD era — that’s After Dave (My joke!). People may think it’s all frappaccinos and solar panels at Victoria Street but the reality is pretty shocking, actually. There’s the District Line, for a start, with all those horrible smells (whoops! Memo to self: must be more ‘odour inclusive’). But Nigel says the real problem is we don’t know what to do with all this ‘popularity stuff’.
Today I have every national daily and most of the Sundays on the phone demanding the first interview with Sam about the new baby.
Nigel says she is the Madonna of the modern Tory party. I wasn’t sure whether he meant the mother of the baby Jesus or the pop star (Shireen’s daughter-in-law, apparently). I reckon he must mean Mrs Ritchie Jnr because Nigel is always saying proudly that ‘we don’t do God’ which, for the record, we all know is a line he’s nicked from Alastair Campbell, like all his best ones. Poppy says he’s got a ‘secret’ picture of Alastair in his top drawer. The other day he told poor Sebastian that he’s got ‘psychological flaws’. Poor Seb: he just likes to keep a tidy desk — so what if his pens are all perpendicular?
FRIDAY A memo has just gone round very sternly instructing us that the ‘Notting Hill set’ is ‘no longer a narrative we use or approve of’. Apparently it was never more than a media creation and we are not to use the term ever again, even in Starbucks. I can’t believe it. The first ‘in crowd’ I’ve ever been a member of and it’s being disbanded, just when I’ve got on to the first rung of the ladder. Mummy will be distraught! Poppy says to ignore the memo, it doesn’t mean anything because everyone knows it’s all window dressing about Hague and Fox and Davis being in on the morning strategy meetings. That’s the pretend one before the real one we’re not supposed to talk about. Last week she saw Foxy crouching outside the shadow Cabinet room with his eye to the keyhole.
She said she went inside to deliver a fax and — wall-to-wall Notting Hill. Not a tie in sight. Apparently Michael G. was talking about ‘triangulating Gandhi and Hayek’ and Ed ‘Crazy’ Vaizey was doing the slides for him.
PM
Mr Redwood came in. I asked him if he wanted a cup of herbal tea, and he rolled his eyes in different directions. I was a bit scared. But Nigel explained that Mr Redwood isn’t really a Vulcan like everyone says, but is Mork from Mork and Mindy. When he left Nigel shouted, ‘Nanu nanu!’ and everyone laughed. I laughed too even though I didn’t really understand. Memo to self: must learn more about popular culture if I’m going to get on. As Dave says in the little handbook we have to carry about at all times: ‘I Must Be the Change!’
tamzin.lightwater@spectator.co.uk
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